"I shouldn't have said that. But you go right straight back home. Your mother wants you. I don't. Oh, dear! How could you say it?"
"Why, 'cause I like to go to funerals. I go to every one Ma does. She's got a real nice 'funeral dress,' an' so have I."
Amy fled. She had never seen anything like little Victoria, and she was so indignant that she almost forgot her dread of what might lie before her. She reached the group about the well, who were now utterly silent, and seemed to be watching with more astonishment than terror something happening within it.
Amy, also, stretched her neck to see, though she shut her eyes, and this naturally prevented; nor did she open them till she felt Cleena clutch the skirt of her frock and heard her exclaim:—
"Faith, but he's the biggest monkey out o' the Zoo! Arrah musha! I'll teach him scaring folks out o' their wits, an' wastin' good bedclothes on such havers! Huh!"
For this was the marvel that now presented. Poor, silly Fayette, looking more foolish and grotesque than ever, climbing upwards into the daylight, blinking and sputtering, his back against the stones of one side the shaft, his feet against the other, his hands clutching, pulling; both feet and hands almost prehensile, like the creature's to which Cleena had likened him, yet safe, unbruised, and only mud-splashed and laughing.
With a final, agile movement he reached the top, threw his arms about the beam, and leaped to the ground beside them. Then he laughed again, hilariously, uproariously, and not for long.
In Cleena Keegan's indignant soul a plan had been rapidly forming.
"So you'd be givin' us all the terrors, would ye, avick? Sure, a taste o' the same medicine's good for the doctor as his patient. I'll just give ye a try of it, an' see what ye say. Hmm, them sheets might ha' lasted for years, so they might; an' them blankets, my heart!"
Before anybody, least of all the astonished "Bony," could comprehend what she would be about, Cleena had tripped and thrown the lad to the ground. She was more powerful than even his boasted muscle, and he quite unprepared for what she meant to do. The life-line made from her cherished bedclothing was twisted about his wet shoulders like a flash. Yet there seemed nothing violent nor vindictive as she rolled him over and over, wisely winding and binding first his hands and feet. After that the punishment she administered was but a question of endurance on her part, and the length of the line.